*
Rohan stands up. The light is so strong everything disintegrates in it — it is like being in a field of pure energy. Rohan sweeps at his head to remove the white cloth that has come to rest over his eyes but realises there is no cloth. The world moves away and everything becomes smaller but then the vision returns for a few moments and he sees the fire eddying along the ground. He is tired, tired of living without Sofia, and as he stumbles against something and falls, feeling a patch of meagre grass under his hands, he knows he is blind.
15
To one side of the house in Heer, between the window to Rohan’s study and the cluster of the towering silk-cotton trees, a bathroom sink is affixed to the wall. As children Jeo and Mikal loved to wash their faces there in the mornings, amid birdsong and the breezes of the garden. At certain hours the sun’s rays shine in the mirror that hangs above it, and above the mirror is a bougainvillea with its heart-like leaves and tissue-paper blossoms, its long branches sometimes covering the mirror so that they have to be parted for the face to be seen. Sometimes they are tied back or are cut away in a square shape to expose the mirror. The colour of rust on apple slices, the deep orange blossoms of the bougainvillea fall into the sink by the dozen and have to be lifted out before the taps are turned.
Naheed splashes water onto her face, avoiding eye contact with her reflection. She tilts her face to the December sun and stands there for a minute, feeling the water dry on her skin. I know he is alive, she had said to her mother, I feel him.
Walking back to the chair she picks up the book she had been reading, having selected it out of one of the boxes. Rohan went to Peshawar two days ago to thank the family of the kind donor. They are no longer a recent presence in the house but still she forgets them at times, emerging out of a doorway and walking into a column of boxes as though she wishes to enter and disappear into it.
There is no body, there is no grave. She will keep telling herself this. If the sun and the moon should doubt, they would be extinguished.
She looks up from the book now and then, her tunic patterned with grey flowers and black leaves, a garden at dusk, due to the ash.
Love does not make lovers invulnerable, she reads. But even if the world’s beauty and love are on the edge of destruction, theirs is still the only side to be on. Hate’s victory does not make it other than what it is. Defeated love is still love.
II. THE BLIND MAN’S GARDEN
If there is no God,
Not everything is permitted to man.
He is still his brother’s keeper
And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,
By saying that there is no God.
16
Adam was pardoned in winter.
The thought comes to Mikal as he stands in the cold air, his breath appearing and disappearing before him. In his bandaged right hand he holds the small dried flowers he has kept hidden in his pocket. The index finger is missing from each hand. The flowers are faded and torn, but with all the grey around him they are still the brightest things in his gaze. He shields them as he would a candle flame, as though preventing their colours from being extinguished. He runs a finger along the centre of one, the parts small yet feelable, fine as thread with minute swellings of pollen.
He turns and walks back into the building.
It is the mountain house owned by the warlord who is holding him prisoner. The chain at his ankles is long enough for him to walk at a slow pace but not to run. He goes through the kitchen without pausing and climbs the staircase and then continues along a long corridor, towards a room filled with voices at the end.
He saw the Quadrantids meteor shower three nights ago so he knows what month it is. Meteor showers occur at approximately the same time every year and the Quadrantids are seen at the beginning of January.
He was trying to escape from here the night he saw it. The house is surrounded by towering pines and snow-covered peaks, most of its rooms locked, the only human presence being a retinue of six of the warlord’s men.
He still doesn’t know where Jeo is. During the months since his capture in October, he has been bartered and sold among various warlords, and as the weeks have gone by there have been fewer and fewer words from him, none at all on most days. The current warlord doesn’t even know his name.
He comes into the room to find the men huddled around a coal brazier. The warlord is a bandit and the son of bandits, and Mikal has heard stories of how much his bloodthirstiness is feared. Once, having received word that he was about to mount a raid, the inhabitants of a village had left their jewellery and valuables out in the streets at night, the thousands of banknotes blowing about in the air as he rode in.
Mikal lifts a pomegranate from a dish and squats in the far corner of the room, listening to them as he opens the fruit with his teeth and fingernails, careful as he manipulates the fruit because the wounds from the missing fingers are still tender these months later. Every warlord has told him that he would have to be ransomed. He had refused to give any of them a contact address, no matter what they did to him. The only way anyone could gain financially from him was to send him to work on construction sites every day — a school being built, a prison for women being expanded — and he laboured while wearing his chains, becoming thinner with each week, his clothes hanging on him in rags. His hair became long and lay on his head like a thick ungovernable cap, and he still wore the boots he had been wearing back in October, having washed the blood out of them. He worked as hard as he could because he feared they would otherwise shoot him for being just a mouth to feed. But then being worked to death was another fear.
He chews the pomegranate seeds and drips the red liquid from his mouth onto the bandaged areas of his hands, knowing it is a potent healer.
One of the men is lamenting about a pistol that keeps jamming. It is an M9 Beretta and Mikal knows how simply the trouble can be fixed. He could tell the man to put a piece of electrical tape over the hole in the bottom of the pistol’s handle to keep the dust out. But he remains silent, keenly alive to the possibility that the weapon could be turned on him at some point as he attempts to flee.
He has been brought here to the mountain house to assist in a mission, a theft. Around the fire the men are finalising the details of the plan. The Prophet Muhammad’s 1, 400-year-old cloak has been kept at the mosque in Kandahar since 1768. But when the American bombing started back in October, the cloak was brought into the mountains for safekeeping, and it hasn’t been sent back to Kandahar yet. It is still there in a high-altitude mosque a distance of fifty miles from this house, and the warlord wishes to acquire it to increase his prestige, to benefit from its miraculous powers.
The warlord’s most expert thieves will go with Mikal to acquire the Prophet’s cloak, a father-and-son team, the son the same age as Mikal. The sacred garment is no doubt guarded and if they are discovered during the crime a fight will ensue. Mikal would rather not take part in the theft but he has to obey. In addition, the warlord has said that he will consider granting Mikal his freedom if the cloak is successfully brought to him. Mikal doesn’t believe the man would keep his word, so he resolves to remain alert to every possibility of escape during the journey.
They stand up when they are ready to go, everyone beginning to walk out to the front courtyard to see them off. Mikal lingers in the room and is the last one through its door: with as much swiftness as his chained legs allow him, he picks up the bullet he had seen lying under a chair the moment he came in. He works it into the waistband of his trousers as he walks behind the others in the dark corridor, the metal cold against his skin even through the fabric.